


The Susie Crabtree Phenomenon

by phinnia



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 18:36:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16101425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phinnia/pseuds/phinnia
Summary: In which Tom experiences stomach lurch, hives, exposure to Bowie, goths, Casablanca, and ponders changing his name to Tara.   Just another fun day in the Delta Quadrant, right?   Set late season 1-early 2.





	The Susie Crabtree Phenomenon

Newly minted Lieutenant Tom Paris, late of the Auckland Penal Colony, skimmed the room with his eyes before he sat down, sat with his back to the window (it was unlikely anyone was about to jump up and shiv you at warp six) and tried to ignore the murmurs.  
  
Oh, he could hear them.   He knew what they were about.  They were always the same.   Caldik Prime, how he was a mercenary for gold-pressed-latinum or a chance to fly a ship, an outmate review, a bar tab paid off.     
  
Not for the first time, Tom wished he’d been born a Ferengi.   First, oo-mox was easier than other sexual favors by miles, at least from where he was sitting, and second, that was a species that understood merceneries like himself.    
  
They respected mercenieries.  
  
He could be the first human dai’mon.     
  
“What’s funny?”  
  
Tom looked up to see his only friend on the ship sitting across from him, looking curiously in his eyes.     
  
“Well, not that, that’s for sure.”   Tom poked the green … stuff … Neelix was serving today with his fork.   “That’s way past funny and on the way to ‘what the fuck’.”  
  
Harry grinned.   “A heavily spiced ‘what the fuck.’   What are these ‘Talaxian spices’, anyway?”    
  
“Don’t know.  But they’re in everything.   Probably eleven of them.   Eleven herbs and spices.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Tom shook his head.  “Cultural reference.   For an old Earth company that used to make chicken with a secret blend of eleven herbs and spices.”  
  
“You like history?”  
  
“Oh, yeah.  Love it.   Twentieth century, nineteenth century.”  
  
“So if we ever get home, Neelix could start a chicken company.”   Harry laughed, pushing a lock of black hair out of his face.  
  
“Talaxian Fried Chicken.”  Tom laughed right along with him.   “It would be fantastic.”   He tried to focus on the taste of the ‘what-the-fuck’ and not the look of Harry’s laughing eyes or how that black hair fell in his face sometimes or how he knew that lurching feeling in his stomach wasn’t just a reaction to the heavily-spiced what-the-fuck.  
  
Not this _again._  
  
  
Tom hadn’t cared about the state of what was in between people’s legs for some time now.   He knew what was in between his own well enough, and he knew enough about piloting and docking to assume he’d figure out how to make it work.   He had ten fingers and a tongue and a cock and that was usually enough to satisfy any one - human, alien, whatever.    Hadn’t tried anything with any light-based beings yet.   That would be really interesting.    
  
But that lurch in his stomach - that lurch was what he felt when he looked at Susie Crabtree, and that was what made him almost flunk third-year Stellar Cartography, and he did not need to be feeling that lurch about his only friend on this ship.     
  
Oh no.     
  
So he throws himself into an away mission, and gets convicted of murder this time.  Good going, Paris.   Fortunately, it turns out to be false, but _seriously_.  
  
  
  
Tom stares up at his ceiling and sighs.     
  
Fucking Vidiians.     
  
Didn’t know when to quit.   Harvesting people’s _faces_ , genetically splitting people in _half_ , everything else.     
  
His door chime rang.  
  
“It’s open.”  
  
Harry comes into his room.   “Thinking?”  
  
“Not about much ’til you got here.”  Which was almost true, at least.   Harry could sure make that uniform look good.   Nice ass.   Not that he’d not noticed that before.   Harry’s ass was one of his best features.    
  
Harry walks around in front of him, giving Tom an even nicer view of his ass, and sits down the end of his bed.   “What about?”  
  
“Lots of things.   Vidiians that don’t know when to quit.  Flying.   Sex.”  _You.  How you’re basically Susie Crabtree, except this time I don’t have hives, thank God._  
  
“You need to get laid.”   Harry laughs.  
  
“I know I do.   Oh, I wish I was female.   Girls on this ship have it easy.   Guys are drooling over them.”   Tom thought about this for a minute.  “I could ask the Doctor to give me a sex change, that would be interesting.   What would I call myself?   Tammy?  Nah, that’s a dumb name.    Tiffany?”  
  
“Tara.”   Harry suggested.    
  
“Oh, that sounds _good_.  Tara Paris.  Wouldn’t that shock my dad if we ever got home.”  He puts on a breathy voice.  “Hi, dad, it’s me, Tara.  I used to be Tom, but I got a few things changed.”  
  
“You’d have to change your sexual orientation, wouldn’t you?”     
  
“Nah.”   Tom says.     
  
“No?”  
  
“Doesn’t really matter to me what’s between the legs, Harry.  Can I make whoever’s running things come?    That’s the point.”    He imagines himself as a girl.   “What would you think?”  
  
“Of what?”  
  
“Tara Paris.  Hypothetically.”  
  
Harry squinted at him.   “You could grow your hair longer.”  
  
“Yeah.   I could.”     
  
The red alert klaxon went off, and they got to their feet and ran for the turbolift.  
  
Tom was still thinking about it later, though.     
  
  
He thought about it for his entire day off, staring out the window at the warp-dragged stars and ignoring all attempts at contact, and then he woke up the following day with hives all over himself.     
  
Oh, here we are again.   Great.    
  
So he dragged himself down to Sickbay and Kes, who was more understanding than the Doctor would ever hope to be, replicated him an anti-histamine.   Which failed to work.     
  
The Doctor then told him the hives were psychosomatic.  
  
Tom knew that, of course.   He’d been here before.  
  
  
“In my ready room, Mr. Paris.   Mr. Chakotay, take the conn.”  
  
Tom groaned silently to himself, scratched a hive on the back of his hand, and followed the captain across the bridge and into her private domain.  She got herself another coffee; he just stood and waited and tried not to think about itching.  
  
“Have a seat, Tom.”   Janeway sipped her coffee and sat down on the sofa.    
  
Tom sighed and sat down himself.  
  
“What is this about … psychosomatic … hives?”  
  
He sighed.   “It’s a long story, Captain.”  
  
“How long?”  
  
“Well, let’s say it starts with why I almost failed third-year Stellar Cartography.”  
  
“Right.   But why is it happening _again?_ ”  
  
“Oh, that’s an even more difficult story.”    Tom got up and paced around the room.   “You know my father, right?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Do you think he’d mind having a daughter?”  
  
Janeway choked on her coffee, and then cleared her throat, and then set her cup down.   “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Tom?   Or at least a little closer to the beginning.”  
  
So Tom looked out the window at the stars going by at half-impulse and told Janeway the whole filthy, horrible story.   Right from Suzie Crabtree and the hives and the other admiral’s son up to Harry and how they met in the bar and that conversation about the chicken and the stomach lurch and their conversation about Tara Paris the other day.   And how he’d woken up this morning with psychosomatic hives.     
  
“So let me see if I understand.”   Janeway replicated herself a third cup of coffee.   “You want to make yourself into a girl because of Ensign Kim.”  
  
“That’s basically it.”  
  
“Do you really want to do this?”  
  
“Not really, no.”  
  
“Have you tried _talking_ to him?”  
  
“Captain, that would be the end of a beautiful friendship.”  Tom said in shock, turning on his heel.  “And I don’t have many of those _anywhere_ , never mind here.”  
  
“Are you Ilsa in this metaphor, or Rick, or Louis?”  Janeway’s eyes were twinkling.  
  
“I’m not sure.”  
  
“Well, figure that part out.”   Janeway says.   “And try talking to Ensign Kim, see if you can get rid of those hives.  Dismissed.   You can have the rest of the day off to figure it out.”  
  
  
He watched Casablanca that afternoon (admiring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in equal measures) to see if that would help him come up with something, but no.     
  
His door chime sounded again.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Harry was in the doorway.   “You have _hives_?”  
  
Tom thought about denying it, but no, the itching was too awful.   “Yup.”  
  
“ _Psychosomatic_ hives.”   Harry came in and the door swished shut.     
  
“This place would be nothing without its rumor machine.   Where’d you hear this?”  
  
“The whole bridge is talking about it.    What did the Captain want with you this morning?”  
  
“Well, it wasn’t kinky sex, I’ll tell you that.”  Tom sighs.  “She wanted to know why I had psychosomatic hives.”  
  
“So?”   Harry sits down on the sofa.  
  
“So what?”  
  
“So why _do_ you have psychosomatic hives?”  
  
“Oh, Harry.”   Tom got up and paced around.   “That is a long story, and I’m not sure you’re ready for the whole thing.”   He stops walking to scratch an itch on the back of his neck.    
  
“Turn around.”  
  
“What?”   Tom turns around.  
  
Harry squints at him seriously.   “Are you wearing … eyeliner?”  
  
“So what if I am?   I do that sometimes.”     
  
“You wear _eyeliner_ sometimes?”  
  
“Tons of guys did, Harry.   Bowie did all the time.  It was part of the Goth uniform.   I still do.”  
  
“You’ve … completely lost me now.”  
  
Tom sighs.   “You have to start reading more history, Harry.   David Bowie.  Famous musician.   Seventies rock.”  
  
“Is this like that surf rock stuff we listened to last time in the holodeck?  That wasn’t bad.”  
  
“Absolutely nothing like that.”  And he pulls up ‘Space Oddity’, because it seems apropos, and they listen to that.  
  
Harry listens thoughtfully.  “So that’s Bowie.”    
  
“Well.   Not really.   He’s … different.   He had … stages, you know.   Phases.  Periods.   An early period, a Berlin Period, an Aladdin Sane period.   That sort of thing.  He had personae, he sort of put them on and took them off.”  
  
“Like you.”  
  
Tom laughs.   “What are you talking about, Harry?”  
  
“Well, you have personae.   There’s ‘flirt Tom Paris’ and ‘Starfleet officer Tom Paris’ and ‘bad-boy Tom Paris’.   There’s the Tom Paris you are when you’re trying to annoy Tuvok or Chakotay, and then there’s the Tom Paris I know.”  
  
_That’s probably the closest one to the ‘real’ one, if there can ever be said to be a ‘real’ one._  
  
“So what else did Bowie do?”  
  
“He had one hell of a catalogue.”   Tom smiles to himself.   “Let’s see.”   And he pulls up the Ziggy Stardust album and they listen to that.    They play through a lot of Bowie.      
  
It doesn’t help the itching, though.   Tom supposes he has nobody to blame but himself.  
  
  
The next day on shift is torture.   You can fly a starship and scratch psychosomatic hives at the same time, as long as you don’t think too much about either one.    Janeway gives him a look in the mess hall at lunch and Tom just shrugs and spreads his arms wide.  He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing here.     
  
Harry comes over to sit with him at lunch, brushing another lock of his hair out of his utterly gorgeous face.   “I looked up the goths.  I can’t see what they have to do with eyeliner, though.”  
  
“Wrong goths, Harry.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Tom sighs.   “There were the Visigoths, which is what you found, and there were the goths, which were a kind of … oh, they’re really difficult to explain.   Nothing like Visigoths.   A lot of makeup for the guys and black hair, velvet, lace, leather.   It’s … another one of those subculture things.   Obsession with death and the afterlife.   Frankenstein.   Did you ever read Frankenstein?”  
  
“Uh, no.”  
  
“Harry, Harry, Harry.   You have a lot of catching up to do.”  
  
“You are surprisingly well-read.”  
  
“Yup.   Not much else to do in a Federation penal colony.   Lots of books in my house growing up.”    He scratches a hive on his cheek.   They’re getting _worse._  
  
“Are those actually getting worse?  They weren’t on your face yesterday.”  
  
“Yeah, they are.”  Tom sighs again.     
  
  
He tries to go down to Sickbay again because he looks like _hell_ but it’s no use.  They’re just there.     
  
  
The next morning he wakes up with hives on the palms of his hands and he actually has to call off sick, the itching is so terrible.    He doesn’t dare leave his quarters.   And Janeway says that he has to fix this, and consider that an order.  The ‘or else I’ll seal you two in a Jefferies tube’ is implied.  
  
He tries desperately to think about something, anything that isn’t itching when his door chime goes off in the middle of the morning.  
  
“Yeah.”   He had no idea who it was.  
  
It was Harry.   “The captain said we had to … talk about something?”  
  
“How much did she tell you?”  Tom paces to the other end of the room.  
  
“Just that.   She said we had to talk about something.”  
  
“That’s all she said.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“You’re sure that’s all she said.”  
  
“Yes, Tom, I’m sure that’s all she said.”  
  
Tom sighs.   Well, goodbye, friendship with Harry.   “You know about Suzie Crabtree, right?”  
  
“That girlfriend you had, the one you got hives over and nearly flunked third-year Stellar Cartography?”  
  
“Yeah, that’s the one.   So … well, um …”  Tom stares at his spotted bare feet and mumbles something.  
  
“I can’t hear you.”  
  
“I said, you remind me of Suzie Crabtree.”  
  
Harry looks at him with his head tipped, confused.   “What exactly does that mean?”  
  
Tom sits down on his chair and starts scratching in about six different spots.   “You … you make my stomach lurch, before I’ve eaten dinner.  You make me break out in hives.   They’re getting worse.   I think if I waited much longer to tell you this, I wouldn’t be able to walk anymore.   They’d be on the bottom of my feet.”   Tom sighs.   “I even considered becoming a girl for you.”  
  
“Tom.”   Harry looks at him in exasperation.   “You know I went to Julliard, right?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Do you know where I went before Julliard?”  
  
“Uh, no.   Where?”  
  
“An all-boys private boarding school in South Carolina.”   Harry smirks.  “And we got up to some things after hours.”  
  
Tom holds his breath.   He can’t believe this.   “What kind of … things?”  
  
“Come here and I’ll show you.”    
  
Tom walks across the room.   He feels partly drunk, lightheaded, strange.   Harry puts one hand on his cheek and the other hand under his chin and tips his chin down.  They bump noses and Harry laughs softly in Tom’s ear and their lips meet.    Harry’s lips are soft and warm against his and damn, he knows how to kiss.   Maybe that was one of those things.      
  
“You’re a good kisser.”   Tom gasps as soon as they break apart.  
  
“Thank you.”   Harry murmurs.  
  
“Anything else you’re good at?”    
  
“Oh, lots of things.”   Harry’s grinning now.   “Science, and being an operations officer, and -“  
  
Tom knocks him over on the floor and starts grinding his hips against him.   “How about this?   You any good at this?”     
  
“Oh, definitely.”    Harry murmurs in his mouth.   “I’m _very_ good at this.”   And he slants his hips against Tom’s hips, and he is good at it.   Tom can feel Harry’s cock swelling, and his own, and when they knock together a juddery feeling of sensuality, warmth bleeds through him.  
  
And itchiness.  “Augh!”    Tom’s hands skate over any part of his bare skin he can reach.    
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Itchy.  These hives are driving me nuts.”     
  
Harry’s lips press against his skin, against the hives, and he kisses the itchiness away, licks it away with his tongue.  Somehow, that makes the hives not itch as much.    
  
Tom flicks his tongue inside Harry’s mouth and they twine together, taste each other.  Tom tastes like tea he’s been drinking and desire and sleeplessness.   Harry tastes like lust and coffee.    Their tongues tangle together and Tom licks inside Harry’s mouth, tasting his hot sweetness again and again.  
  
Hands yank at buttons, pull at zippers.   Pants are pushed down and shirts are tossed every-which-way, landing on all parts of the floor.   Boots are kicked off.     
  
Tom drags Harry over to the bed like he’s dragging a drowning man out of a lake, one-handed, crawling, and he lifts Harry onto the bed with deceptive strength.     
  
“You’re also stronger than you look.”   Harry murmurs.  
  
“I am full of contradictions.”   Tom grins at him.   “A mess of contradictions.”  
  
“A veritable Tom Paris  of contradictions, even.”  
  
“Oooh.  I like it.”    He crawls on top of Harry and looks down at him with over-bright blue eyes.    
  
“You look terrible.”   Harry says, still grinning, looking up from the mattress.  
  
“Make me feel better.”   Tom whispers in his ear.  
  
Then there was moaning and groaning and hot friction and lotion and hands wrapping over and under things, tongues licking, teeth nibbling., and there was white-knuckled nail marks on the inside of Tom’s palms, and a bitten lip with a slight trickle of blood running down it.  
  
And then they slept in a tangle of limbs.  
  
  
Tom kisses Harry goodbye just as the turbolift doors open.   “See you later, handsome.”  
  
“Bet on it.”  
  
“I see your hives have gone, Mr. Paris.”   Janeway seems very amused for her first cup of coffee, and Tom can’t be bothered to care.    “Did you ever figure out if you were Rick or Ilsa or Louis?”  
  
“Well, ma’am, I think I’m Rick, but I’m not sure.  You’ll have to ask Harry what he thinks.”  
  
“Well done.   Lay in a course for that cluster nebula two light years away.  I’d like to take a look.”  
  
“Yes ma’am.”   Tom smiles and lays in the course.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
